Jacquotte Delahaye: The Story, Impact, and Legacy of a ...
Delahaye reportedly came from Saint-Domingue in modern Haiti , and was the daughter of a French father and a Haitian mother, who spoke French. According to legend and tradition, she became a pirate after the murder of her father. Jacquotte was a war hero , and to escape her pursuers she faked her own death and took on a nom de guerre in the form of a male alias, living as a man for many years.
Upon her return, she became known as "Back From the Dead Red" because of her striking red hair.
Jacquotte delahaye: Jacquotte Delahaye (fl. ) was a purported pirate of legend in the Caribbean Sea. She has been depicted as operating alongside Anne Dieu-le-Veut as one of very few 17th-century female pirates. There is no evidence from period sources that Delahaye was a real person.
She led a gang of hundreds of pirates, and with their help took over Tortuga , a small Caribbean island off the northwest coast of Hispaniola , in the year of , which was called a "freebooter republic". Primary sources which mention her, her work and happenings, or her life are unknown, nor are there any first-hand accounts. Laura Sook Duncombe wrote: "If Anne de Graaf has only a small chance of having really lived, Jacquotte Delahaye has an even smaller one.
As Benerson Little summarizes: [ 8 ].
Jacquotte Delahaye, for example, is said to have been a biracial female filibuster. She commanded a ship with a crew of a hundred men; she rejected a marriage proposal from filibuster Michel d'Artigue , known as 'le Basque'; and she led the attack on Fort de la Roche on Tortuga and recaptured it from the Spanish.
But there is no evidence that she existed. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. While some of her contemporaries, like Anne Bonny and Mary Read , have become well known, Delahaye has been largely lost to history due to a lack of reliable records. Cameron acknowledges in the foreword that the narrative required many creative liberties, given the scarcity of information available about the heroine.
In fact, several scholars now dispute whether she ever existed at all.
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What alleged details do we have about Jacquotte Delahaye? She was supposedly born in Saint-Dominique in , the daughter of a Haitian mother and a French father. Her mother is believed to have died in childbirth with Jacquotte's younger brother, who was disabled. When her father was killed during a raid by the British Navy, Jacquotte took to the sea and a life of piracy in order to provide for her brother and avenge their losses.
Delahaye is said to have become a fearsome leader, attracting admirers and enemies alike. She became known for her distinct red hair, and during one particular battle, she is said to have faked her own death and temporarily assumed a male alias in order to evade her foes. This made her even more notorious within the pirating world, earning her the nickname "Back from the Dead Red.
By , at the age of just 26, Delahaye had amassed a crew of hundreds and led a successful mission to take control of Fort de la Roche on the Caribbean Island of Tortuga from the Spanish. The harshness of her dramatic exploits is balanced by a much gentler thread that follows Jacquotte's burgeoning love affair with another woman in her crew.
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With Jacquotte very much at its core, the book becomes an ode to the importance of found family. As a mixed race queer woman operating within a treacherous, male-dominated world, Jacquotte knows what it is to face prejudice and be forced into subservience. As she begins to establish her own pirate army, she uses her newfound power to free prisoners from slaver ships and liberate abused women and girls from the port towns they visit on their journey.
It is these very people, inspired by Jacquotte's resistance movement, who flock to bolster her crew, bonded by their shared desire to live on their own terms. This results in a large cast of supporting characters that come and go.
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A key group of them are engaging and memorable — like Jacquotte's doctor brother, Marceau; her lover, Teresa; and Mbala, a freed slave and gentle giant who emerges as one of Jacquotte's greatest allies. With so many others to keep track of, however, some smaller characters can begin to blur together, meaning their inevitable loss to the perils of battle and life at sea fail to resonate as keenly as the author likely intended.
Still, The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye is ultimately a joy to read. As rousing and exciting as it is heartfelt, this is an immersive portrait of a life lived dangerously but with honor, and an attempt to shine the spotlight on an overlooked legend from the golden age of piracy.
This review first ran in the June 19, issue of BookBrowse Recommends. She was completely alone, all but for the rats. Weak light streamed through the single barred window of her cell. The bells began to toll. This morning was not the customary clangor, one chime for each hour of the day; instead, the bells pealed and trilled.
But these bells were for a much grimmer affair: her execution. Footsteps echoed down the corridor. Her heart leapt into her throat. She wished she could do something, fight, scream, cry, but when the guard opened the heavy metal door of the cell and clamped irons down on her wrists and ankles, there was no fight left in her.
Not since Tortuga.
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Her capture had left her sore and weak. She was glad her crew could not see her now; Captain Delahaye, scourge of the Caribbean Sea, shackled by a Frenchman. The guard led her from the cell. The prison was a labyrinthine mess; long corridors with cramped cells stacked on top of each other, filled with prisoners, their skin tarred with blood and dirt.
The men gaped as she was marched past. They had seen the proclamations bearing King Louis's seal. Captain Jacquotte Delahaye. The woman pirate captain. The red-haired menace. They knew of her, and they knew of the five- hundred-livre reward for her capture. She was infamous, a living legend.